As Tall As Lions
by Dj Tigeress
Summary: She's not like the rest of the campers at Camp Half-Blood, and after two weeks of not getting called in by her parent, Natalie learns her parents might be even more powerful than the Big Three. Rated T for mature content.


**I never realized how long it's been since I last wrote a story. I've been running out of ideas, but then one came back to my mind. This story idea was based off of a title idea I "adopted" off of NaNoWriMo, which I am just as excited for. (For those of you who don't know, NNWM is where authors from all over the world try to write a 50k novel in the entire month of November.) There were two that popped to me: Gypsy and As Tall As Lions. I thought about Gypsy, thinking maybe about a girl who has to move from place to place, thinking that it is only because of her mother's job, like a gypsy, and not because her mother protection. As Tall As Lions was my choice when I thought about Nemean Lions, but remembering they already had a Nemean Lion thing, I thought about Macedonian Lions and an entire plot just formed in my head almost immediately.**

**Natalie Donian (named after Natalie Wood in Gypsy, so I could put a little from my old idea in) always looks up at Leo, the way the stars are so bright. She lives with her step-father, who has always looked at Nat oddly, saying that just before her mother died, leaving her with him; she had told him something shocking that he had never been able to handle so well. She always believed it was something about her father, but he would never speak a word. After a fight with her step-father, Nat decides that she would run away, but her walk ends short when she finds herself approached by a Nemean Lion, but for some reason, and when Nat runs into some people who had been searching for this lion, and when she introduces herself, they decide to take her to a special place where she meets people who will change her life.**

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"Hey, Dennis?" I called across the room, leaning into the kitchen a little bit to see if my step-father was in there. I had always had a hard time calling him dad, ever since I was only eight and my mother married him, at the time I had called him Mr. Briad, but he told me to call him Dennis. When they got married, my mom told me I should call him dad, but it wasn't the same, as I had never known what it was really like to have a father. Before I was even born, my father had disappeared, and my mother told me stories about him at night, about the things they would do together, until one night he left her alone, and soon after she realized she had been pregnant with me. Though, unfortunately, when I was 12, my mother passed away from cancer. Two years since, I had been living alone with Dennis, and he had never thought of even dating someone else, he didn't want to die after he married her and leave me with someone with no connections to my family all together.

I moved into the kitchen and saw Dennis staring out the windows, the sink getting ready to overflow. I quickly ran and reached under him, pushing the tap down and turning off the water, "Wha?" Dennis looked down below him and gave me an apologetic look in which I chuckled at. Dennis was tall and handsome, with short black hair that just reached his ears and nice bright brown eyes. He wasn't completely built, but was still somewhat strong, and had no problem lifting me up, but I didn't like it when he did, because even though he was still young now, he wouldn't be young forever. Soon enough, he would never be able to lift me, and he would attempt it still and hurt himself. "I'm sorry," he muttered, looking back out the window at the highway, watching the cars pass by in front of our house, hundreds of cars each hour.

"Are you okay?" I asked him, when I had tried to match his gaze out the window, but he sat back and shook his head a little bit, unsure of what to say to me. I didn't want to force him to say anything, so I backed away a little bit. I leaned up against the fridge and looked over to the wall, staring intently at the calendar and realized what had been keeping him so down. Today had marked two years since my mother died, and I looked back to Dennis, "Oh, right," I muttered softly as I felt the pain he'd been showing the past few days, like a needle running through my chest.

Dennis turned around to me and gave me a hug, "I know it must be so much harder on you," he said, "Sometimes I wonder how someone like you keeps sane. No father, no mother, living with a step-father, and then," he pulled away, holding me by the shoulders and meeting my eyes, "I tell myself, 'It's Natalie Donian, one of the bravest, most strong-hearted girls I've known.'" Dennis explained to me with a little smile on his face. He gave me a little hug before turning around, "You getting hungry?"

"I was thinking of just ordering something, actually," I told him, "I'm not in the mood for something home-made." I supposed that was because mom would always cook, and never order in unless she had been in a rush. I didn't want to eat homemade food if it only made me think of her. Dennis understood what I meant and walked out of the room to grab the phone and dial a nearby pizza place.

I moved into the place where Dennis had been standing and looked outside, staring at the downpour. I could hear it on the roof and I shivered a little bit, as though the cold had been seeping through the windows. I could see the street, and it didn't seem to be all that busy, and my heart sank even more. My mother had been sick; she'd been struck by cancer and had been fighting it for years. For some reason, watching cars pass by, I thought of her, like they resembled something to me. Maybe it was the ambulance that had taken her away, promising me everything would be fine when she had a heart-attack. Maybe it was just the rain that was blocking my view, and looking at the cars I thought of runners, as my mother had been quite athletic, very active, trying to push past her cancer.

I sat by the window for what seemed like forever, looking out at the rain, watching it fall on the window sill, patting against the roof quietly. I walked through out of the kitchen, not being able to hold by the window. I sat on the couch and turned on the television, flipping through channels. Nothing drew my attention in too well, and I turned the TV off once more with a sigh. "What is it?" I turned around to Dennis.

I shook my head, "I hate this day. I think of my mother, and I think of my father, and I think of me. I never knew my father, and I only knew my mother for a few years, of what I could remember her at least. How am I supposed to grow up, how am I supposed to see myself when I don't have any family to tell me what will happen? I have no family history to look back on, for Christ sake I couldn't even get my father's name!" I shouted, standing up, "For all I know, my mother could have been raped, and I could have been the victim that turned her blood cold. Every time she looks at me, she thinks of being raped, and maybe she's happy that she died!"

I was starting to ramble on, and I could see a little bit of fear and anger mixed into Dennis's eyes. Fear, like maybe I was learning something I shouldn't know about, and anger because he didn't want me to see my mother that way. "Maybe she was happy dying; she would never have to face me."

"Now don't say that!" Dennis stood up angrily, staring at me harshly, "Your mother was a kind woman. She loved you for who you were, and she was never happy to know she was dying, she was crushed every night. She cried, Natalie, she cried every night, afraid that she wouldn't wake up. She didn't want to lose you; she didn't want to push you to do something like this."

I looked down and turned around, "Of course she would say that." I muttered, walking towards the door.

"Where are you going?" Dennis demanded to know, but I had already shut the door behind me and was standing in the pouring rain, walking down the street. I knew exactly where I was going, a place that I felt close to everybody I knew, and everybody I never got the chance to know.

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**So…that's it for the start of my story, and though it's not all that long, I didn't have much to write on, and I didn't even really plan for her to walk out of the house just yet.**

**PLEASE stay tuned for more chapters to come!**

**READ AND REVIEW!  
****~Dj**


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